This first book in Hugo Award winner Philip K. Dick's final trio of novels (followed by The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is a disorienting and bleakly funny work is about the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity. In VALIS (an acronym for the Vast Active Living intelligence System), a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat is suddenly given a wildly different view of reality through the beam of a pink laser. Dick spins a theological detective story (and increasingly becomes a participant himself), in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.